


Deflection

by LtLJ



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Reality, Amnesia, Friendship, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Quantum Mirror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-05-13
Updated: 2006-05-13
Packaged: 2017-10-02 14:26:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LtLJ/pseuds/LtLJ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John didn't remember losing Atlantis, didn't remember dying, and he was trying not to find it unfair that Rodney wouldn't talk to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deflection

John didn't remember losing Atlantis, didn't remember dying, and he was trying not to find it unfair that Rodney wouldn't talk to him.

The first day they let him out, he found Rodney sitting on a low stone balustrade on one of the terraces. They had said this nameless city had been culled by the Wraith, but John had his doubts. There were no survivors, and the gray stone was old and cracked, and overgrown with flowering vines. The violet and blue flowers looked alien and exotic and weirdly unreal against gray sky, gray stone. Rodney was looking down into one of the pools that was clotted with green water, when John said, "Hey."

Rodney looked up, startled, his face white. John started to step over the wall to sit down. He froze when Rodney stood abruptly and backed away, almost tripping over a loose tile. John said, "No, it's okay. I know I'm the wrong one."

Rodney stared at him, jaw dropped. "You...you know?"

"They told me." John moved slowly, trying to look harmless. He sank down on the wall, feeling the rough stone through his BDU pants. "About the cloning thing. Ancient, or Wraith? Whatever. Maybe you could tell me what happened? To Atlantis." And Elizabeth was dead, they had told him that when he asked for her. He had asked for Rodney too, but Rodney hadn't come. He couldn't remember other names yet, and so many of the faces weren't familiar.

Rodney shook his head, his face a weird mix of relief and horror. Then he walked away.

That was pretty much how John's life was going lately.

  
***

  
They had meetings a lot, pouring over diagrams and schematics and laptops, talking about wormhole battle tactics and shields. John had touched a laptop, running his fingers over the silver case, wondering why the brand name and the expedition logo weren't there anymore, and they had all looked at him like he was crazy. "The government had them removed. You remember?" somebody -- Zelenka? -- had said, carefully easing it away from John's hand. John had stared at him, narrow-eyed. He looked like Zelenka, used Czech words that John recognized, but he had lost his glasses, and it made him look different. His fear made him look different too.

But they were probably all just nervous because John had killed that guy.

That was on the second day. John hadn't talked to anybody but Rodney, and had just wandered the rooms and halls and courts of this ruined palace in this ruined city, looking for people he couldn't remember well enough to recognize. Some things were familiar: folding chairs and tables and heavy crates, conduit running from naquadah generators, recharging batteries and floodlights that chased the shadows from dusty corners. This place was as humid as a Florida summer, the air thick and soupy, as unlike Atlantis as possible. As the people were unlike as possible. He wanted to find Ford, or Bates, or Stackhouse, someone who could tell him how Elizabeth had been killed, but he couldn't remember what they looked like, and he didn't know how to read the insignia on the uniforms anymore.

A Marine had followed him into one of the empty corridors between chambers, and John had ignored him until the guy had grabbed his arm, dragged him into an alcove in the dark, and shoved a hand between his legs. John had said his first words in more than forty-eight hours, "That was stupid," and snapped the guy's neck.

Nobody bothered him after that, but nobody talked to him either.

This meeting was more pointless than usual. Rodney wasn't here, even though he was on the senior staff. Instead of trying to secure the position they had now, they wanted John's advice about attacking some other settlement.

John paced on the other side of the room while they gathered around the table; he was always cold and ached in his back and knees. He was getting the idea that a lot of his friends, a lot of the people he should remember, must be dead. He was also starting to wonder how long copies lasted, if the reason they hadn't told him everything, hadn't tried harder to make him remember, was because they knew this version of him was dying too. When they asked, he said, darkly, "I don't have enough information to make a tactical assessment." Though it was all there in his head when they said gateroom and shield. The codes to send, who should go first and who should stay back as reinforcement, what to hit first, how they should be armed, what to expect. But he didn't feel like being cooperative.

And it really creeped him out that Sumner was here.

The Colonel looked up at him, smiling thinly. "That's not very helpful, soldier." He was the only one who wasn't afraid of John, but then John had already killed him once, so maybe the mystery was gone.

John stalked over and leaned on the table, watching the others edge away. He said, "Tell me how we lost the city."

"How you lost it," Sumner countered coldly, and John blinked, because how unfair could you get, talking to the remnant of a dead man?

A worn tentative woman who might once have been Dr. Simpson said, "There was an explosion, sabotage."

John still didn't remember, but it sounded like something that might have happened.

For a long moment it was quiet, then Beckett said evenly, "I think we all know this isn't working out as planned."

"You think?" John snarled.

  
***

  
The building they had put their headquarters in was four stories tall, and had broad open balconies on the upper level, littered with old broken glass. John went up there after the meeting, to stand in the quiet and the damp air.

From the top one on the south side, he could see the stargate. It was in a big sunken court, ringed with large heavy pillars that probably made it nearly impossible to get a Wraith dart through. John thought that might be why they hadn't brought the jumpers, but he thought he could have gotten them through the obstruction. Slowly and carefully ease through the gate, then straight up. And fuck Sumner anyway, leaving their best resource behind.

Traders came occasionally, making deliveries of food, never getting much past the gate well. There was no guard on this excellent vantage point, but there was a camera. John had ignored it up to this point, but when he saw Rodney talking to one of the traders, a small figure in a leather coat, he stepped in front of it, blocking the view. Rodney and the trader were in one of the narrow archways that led up toward the well, out of sight of anyone on the ground. John didn't know what it was about, but the less Sumner knew about anything, the better.

  
***

  
John had a "let's make the best of it" phase, which lasted about a day. Nobody would talk to him anymore than they had to, or let him work on anything except the stupid attack, which he wasn't going to help with. It wasn't bad enough being dead that he had to be lonely too, and he remembered he wasn't used to that anymore. In fact, he had a vague memory of being fairly popular with the people he had lived with, who had all been a lot nicer to him when he was alive and before the city had gotten blown up. Now most of the scientists and pretty much all the military seemed afraid of him.

He had an unpleasant thought, and went out to one of the terraces. He found a pool and tugged away the coating of slime to the clear water below, and waited for it to still so he could see his reflection. No, that was pretty much him. Hair spiky, nose and chin and ears pointy, with beard stubble because hygiene hadn't exactly been at the top of his priorities lately. It wasn't much of a relief. If he had looked like a monster, if whatever they had done to preserve this part of him had changed him terribly, it would have explained a lot.

He stretched out on the cold stone and looked up at the gray sky, wondering if anybody would look for him.

He wasn't sure how long it had been when Rodney leaned over him, frowning uncertainly. "Oh, hi," John said, startled and hopeful. Rodney had been avoiding him like everybody else, and John hadn't wanted to push.

Rodney stepped back, watching John struggle to sit up. It was harder than John had expected, and his eyes felt gritty and his muscles stiff; he thought maybe he had fallen asleep, and for more than a few hours. "Aren't they feeding you?" Rodney asked suddenly.

John squinted up at him. "Um, there's injections."

Rodney sat down on a fragment of wall, and took out a little wafer thing wrapped in foil. He set it on the tile between them with the air of someone who didn't want to get within arm's reach, nodding for John to pick it up. John kind of resented the feeding time at the zoo approach. "I only killed one guy," he protested.

"Three," Rodney corrected grimly.

"Oh." Well, if you put it that way. John unwrapped it to find a little cake, blander than a power bar. It must be native to Pegasus because the wrapper was blank, with nothing, commercial or military, stamped on it. He hadn't been aware of being hungry, but just the sight of it was making his taste buds burn.

He had finished it, licking the crumbs off his palm, when Rodney said, "They sent me to talk to you."

John paused. "About the attack?"

"Yes."

"It's a stupid plan. There's no reason to leave. This gate is defensible, and these buildings have plenty of room. And it's been deserted long enough for the Wraith to leave it alone." John shook his head helplessly, looking across the terrace to the next building over, where some scientists and techs were setting up a dish for a comm relay on the roof. He didn't know why they wanted to attack another city, when they had a perfectly good one of their own. It wasn't Atlantis, but it could be made secure and comfortable with a little work, and there was plenty of food and water. They should be working on getting a shield up; he knew they had the components, he had seen them. "You should just stay here, make it your base."

Rodney let out his breath, rubbed his sleeve across his forehead. "I know. He...We thought so too."

John nodded. He wondered if the "he" was him, the other him, the original, but he had thought he had been killed before they came here. He wanted to ask, but his thoughts scattered, and what he asked instead was, "I'm hallucinating Sumner, right?"

"Right." Rodney sounded preoccupied. He took the wrapper, stuffed it in his pocket, then walked away.

John figured he couldn't complain. It was the most normal conversation he had had in days.

  
***

  
It got dark, and John knew the Marines moving in and out of the buildings were looking for him. He went down to the edge of the compound, where there was a rambling maze of overgrown garden courts and choked fountains.

He was sitting on top of a wall, listening to insects sing, his black shirt and dark gray pants blending into the shadows. When Rodney went past, moving furtively, he didn't see John at all.

John waited a couple of beats, then slipped silently off the wall, and followed.

Rodney went further into the maze, finally turning into a court near the outer wall. Rodney's footsteps stopped, then John heard voices. Rodney's voice, speaking rapidly, sounding more like himself than he had while talking to John, and a soft female voice. None of the other scientists had come past.

John hesitated. He might be messed up, but he knew this was none of his business. But he had the idea that Rodney could get in a lot of trouble like this, if Imaginary Sumner or whoever found out.

He heard movement behind the wall, more than one person, but by the time he stepped around it, only Rodney was there. He watched Rodney adjust his uniform collar nervously, then turn and take two steps, almost running smack into John. "Gah!" Rodney yelped, and leapt back.

"What?" John added, "It's me."

"Yes, yes, it is you. I just, I didn't realize you were there," Rodney said in a rush. He reached out, then let his hand drop. "Are you all right? I mean, you look all right. It's a little hard to see. Here. In that it's quite dark."

John shrugged. "Sure." He hesitated, but Rodney wasn't showing any sign of imminent retreat, and that was new. He was pretty certain Rodney had been talking to one of the traders again, and he wanted him to be careful. For both of them to be careful. If John could catch them, one of the others could. But he just said, "So...maybe you could talk to me sometime?" Trying not to sound like a complete loser, he added, "Because, you know, nobody else does."

Rodney stared at him for a moment, then drew himself up, lifted his chin and huffed. "Of course."

After that, Rodney was different.

  
***

  
Rodney snuck him a power bar in the morning, a real one, in the commercial wrapper. John wanted to look at the brightly colored paper more closely, but Rodney confiscated it immediately, looking around suspiciously to make sure no one had seen it.

"It's okay," John told him. "The cameras can't pick us up here." They were in a court below the low rambling building where the living quarters were, the cracked walls nearly invisible under the heavy vines.

Rodney took a sharp breath, then nodded. "Cameras. Good to know."

Another group of traders had come through the gate early this morning, but had been turned away. _Dial in and then dial out,_ John thought. Sumner never went to the gate to check on who was coming and going, putting all his trust in the men guarding the area to maintain a count of how many people came, and how many left.

"They're giving you shots," Rodney said, staring at John's arm.

The bruises from having blood drawn constantly and the several-times-daily injections were purple and black, standing out against his skin. "Yeah." John tugged his sleeve down. "I told you that."

"Right." Rodney blinked at him. "Remind me what they're for?"

John threw him a glance. Rodney had handed him the power bar without hesitation; he had sat down next to John at a normal distance for talking, instead of staying carefully out of reach like he had before. "My immune system is shutting down."

Rodney stared at him for a whole minute, long enough that John started to wonder if he had lost time again and this was a different conversation. It didn't help when Rodney asked abruptly, "Do you remember the Athosians?"

_Athosian._ John turned the word over. It was familiar, good familiar, but it didn't bring up any names or images. "No."

Rodney hissed under his breath in frustration. "Great. That's fantastic." He tapped his fingers on the stone, his face set as if he was running calculations in his head.

John watched him thoughtfully. Something was weird, here. Weirder. "Is Sumner a hallucination?"

"I wish." Rodney snorted. He saw what must have been the minute shift in John's expression, and demanded, "What?"

John lifted his brows. "Do you really think it's a good idea to fuck around with me right now?"

"What? What did I say?" Rodney looked genuinely outraged.

John hesitated. Hell, maybe it was him again, forgetting things. "That's not what you said before. You said I was imagining him."

But Rodney didn't deny it. He swore, and looked away for a moment, his jaw tight. When he looked back, he said, "I'm sorry, I'm certain I've been an unhelpful asshole up to this point, but...I'm begging you to believe me now. This is--" He hesitated, his mouth twisted down. "Really important."

"Believe what? Look--" Rodney had been so normal today, the bizarre quality of everything else seemed thrown into sharper relief. John squeezed his eyes shut, focusing on the question, trying to get it out. "What happened? How did we get here?"

"I--" Rodney took a sharp breath. "I don't think that I can tell you. Not without...things happening."

Exasperated, John pointed out, "I'm not going to tell Sumner. I didn't tell him I saw you talking to the traders."

"You saw-- Oh fine, that's wonderful." Rodney clapped a hand to his forehead. "Right, I hate to do this, but I have to test something." He hesitated, wincing in anticipation. "Do you remember the tretonin?"

John's brain went white and he didn't remember anything after that.

  
***

  
There were some odd undercurrents at the next meeting. Not that there weren't odd undercurrents constantly, but John noticed these in particular.

He was pacing near the empty window, where the vines were growing in. He had heard people talk about sealing the windows and doors and putting in air conditioning, but John was always cold now, the chill lodged deep under his skin.

"You're the one who got us into this situation," Sumner said, his voice a low rumble of derision.

"Let's use the jumpers." John snapped his fingers. "Oh, wait. We can't."

"We've told you the plan. We've done everything you should have done," Sumner sneered. "Once we're in, all you have to do is alter the security protocols--"

John laughed, because it really was funny. "Your plan is fucked. We're not going to get in. We'll be dead."

Sumner pushed to his feet, saying slowly, "You useless piece of crap. You aren't worth the trouble."

"He's not the one you're angry at now, is he," Beckett said suddenly. His accent was a little different, but that might be because John didn't remember his voice sounding this cold. "He's doing his best."

Sumner said tightly, "I'm not interested in your opinion."

"You should be," Zelenka told him calmly. "Carson and his staff are the only ones who understand the procedures you need for your plan." He tapped a pen thoughtfully on the table. "The plan you have foisted on us."

Beckett leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. "We've had enough for today. I told you, pushing it does no good. And it's time for his next treatment."

Sumner sneered, and John stirred thoughtfully, thinking about killing him. There was a barrier in his head, blocking off anything to do with Sumner. John had flashes of being jumped unexpectedly, stunned but not unconscious, being grabbed. Betrayed.

He didn't remember hating the man, before; there hadn't been time for that. And this guy was making mistakes Sumner, an SGC veteran, wouldn't make. John had the feeling that he was looking at someone else in Sumner's skin. _Not Sumner,_ he thought. In which case, it would be perfectly okay to kill him.

Beckett was watching John carefully. He said, "Colonel, you need to leave now."

Sumner's face went still, calculating. But he didn't argue, and turned to walk out through an archway wreathed with dry vines.

Zelenka leaned back with a sigh. "Is he making this difficult intentionally, I wonder?"

Simpson shook her head wearily. "Who knows? The only certain thing is that we'd be better off without him."

Carson said, "No, love. We need someone to control the military. And he brought too many of his own people with him." He rested his chin in his hand and looked tired. "If Sheppard was alive, it would be different."

John was getting a headache. "Are you sure I'm dead?"

Simpson looked bleak and Zelenka nodded glumly. Beckett sighed and said, "We're certain, lad. And believe me, we wanted to be proved wrong." He pushed to his feet. "Now let's go do your treatment."

  
***

  
The gray sky was shading into twilight when Rodney found John up on one of the balconies.

"Cameras?" Rodney asked.

"Not from this angle." John eyed him uneasily. If Rodney had been holding a sign that read _I'm up to something_ it couldn't be more obvious. "You're acting weird. And coming from me right now, that's saying something."

"I know, it's just-- I know." Rodney shifted uneasily, rubbing his hands together. "I wanted to ask if you'd consider leaving here. This planet. Going somewhere else."

John shrugged. He was beginning to think any objection Sumner had to this city as a base of operations was because John or maybe Elizabeth had been the one to choose it. And Sumner sure as hell wasn't going to listen to anything he suggested. "Sumner's committed to this attack. He's not going to want to just look for another base."

"Not everybody," Rodney corrected tensely. "Just us."

John stared at him. "Are you nuts?" John had never deserted a post. Fucked up, wrecked, destroyed, yes, but never deserted. He didn't go until he was kicked out or dragged out. "I can't leave. We can't leave. They need us here."

Rodney stepped closer, his face intent. "We can. It's-- We have to."

John shook his head incredulously. "This isn't you."

"Don't say that!" Rodney looked around nervously, even though the balcony and the room behind it were empty. "Look, I can't tell you why this is important. Believe me, I would like nothing better. But you just have to trust me." He pinched the bridge of his nose, as if he was steeling himself for something. "There's something I need to show you. What I've been saying...it'll make a lot more sense if you see this."

"Okay." John felt uneasy. He wasn't sure if he wanted to see anything that would make all this make sense. "Now?"

Rodney nodded, relieved. "Yes. We have to go...it's down on the edge of the compound."

It was dark by the time they got out there, because John took the rambling path that avoided all the cameras and the guards, and it involved climbing down a wall which Rodney fell off and ducking through overgrown brush. Rodney led the way once they got to the outer courts, still bitching reassuringly about falling. He used a pocket flashlight to get through the maze of tumbled walls, and soon they were at the far edge of the gardens. "We have to go outside the compound," Rodney said in a whisper. "There's a break in the wall right here."

"Oh. I can't do that," John said.

"What?" Rodney stared at him, pointing the flashlight at him. "Why not?"

John winced away from the light. "I don't know. I just can't." The wall might as well have been solid and forty feet high. John didn't know what was stopping him, though he thought it was the same thing that had kept him from going down to the stargate. And he could hear people moving outside the wall. "There's someone out there."

"Yes, right." Rodney made an erratic gesture. "It's just the traders."

"Yeah, what's the deal with that? What are they doing here?" John asked, and felt really stupid when someone shot him with a stunner.

  
***

  
John woke fighting the half a dozen people who were trying to hold him down. For once they weren't Marines, but the people he had seen at the gate. Pegasus natives, dressed in softly-dyed leather and knitted wool. He didn't have a clue in hell where he was. It looked like a stone room in some ruin.

"Stop this immediately," a woman's voice snapped. She leaned over him, shouldering the others aside.

John focused on her, and his body just stopped fighting, as if he had been stunned again. But he didn't remember her.

The others backed off and she knelt beside him. He sat up and one of the others said uneasily, "Teyla, are you certain--"

"Yes. Be quiet." She said to John, "You know me?"

He shook his head. He was breathing hard, not from the fight. He was freezing and sweating at the same time, aching all over.

"I see." She took his hand. No one had touched him since he could remember, and her hand was small and warm, soft where it wasn't calloused, and he had to fight the urge to just climb into her lap. "All will be well," she said. She put her free hand on his forehead and it felt so good on his chilled skin he closed his eyes. She said, "There was perhaps a medical treatment, that they were to give you this morning?"

John cleared his throat. "Yeah, I think so." It was morning now, there was gray light coming through the doorway. He knew he needed the shots. Most of them, anyway. They were keeping him alive, sort of.

She nodded. "We will take care of you."

It got very blurry after that, and he thought he passed out for a little while. Drifting, he thought they might just leave him, once they realized he was a lousy choice for a hostage. He was dying, and even if he wasn't, Sumner wasn't thrilled with him and unlikely to exert himself on his behalf.

But when he woke up, he was ensconced in a warm pallet made up of wool blankets and a couple of military-issue sleeping bags. There was always two or three people guarding him, but they kept doing things like bringing him more pillows and blankets, and putting cold compresses on his forehead and trying to coax him to eat or drink. Teyla appeared often to stroke his hair back from his forehead and rest her hand on his cheek. "You are coming home with us," she told him.

"No, I'm not," John said blearily into his pillow, watching her with one wary eye.

She shook her head and smiled. "I will not argue with you."

Basically, John was having a lot of trouble getting motivated to escape.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed when he felt like getting up. He untangled himself from the blankets and stood up, and staggered out into the next room. The people taking care of him followed, but no one tried to stop him.

The chamber was round, like the bottom of a rotunda, but the dome was open to the air. There was a doorway framed with pillars, looking out down a hill into another ruined city. John thought, from the climate and the cloud cover, that they were on the same planet.

Teyla was sitting on the floor on a folded blanket. There were a few more traders out here, armed and on watch, and some leather supply bags. Her eyes on the open doorway and the desolate view, Teyla said, "Here, Major," and patted the blanket beside her.

John sank down. "Where are we?"

"Some distance from the gate," Teyla said. "They will not find us here."

John thought he should be worried about that, that it should sound threatening instead of reassuring. Theoretically. He felt blurry again and started to slump over. Teyla caught him with strong arms and eased him down into her lap. He wrapped an arm around her and buried his face against her warm midriff, and inhaled the scent of wool and herbal soap and clean female sweat, and tabled the escape plan again.

Some time later there was movement in the room and Rodney's voice demanded, "How is he?"

"How do I look?" John growled, not bothering to sit up. He remembered that Rodney had sold him out for some inexplicable reason, and if he wasn't being cuddled in a beautiful woman's lap, he would be really pissed off about it.

"His fever is still very high, but he seems a little improved from this morning." Teyla still sounded worried. "There is no word?"

"Not yet. If something's gone wrong, and something has definitely gone wrong, or they'd be here...." Rodney sounded exasperated and deeply worried. "Dammit, maybe I should have waited."

"No. You did right. You could not leave him there. It was...intolerable."

"You were the last person I'd expect to kidnap me, you bastard," John had to put in.

"Don't be an idiot. We didn't kidnap you, we're saving you. Now shut up," Rodney snapped, then awkwardly patted him on the side.

  
***

  
John listened to them talk, but it didn't make sense.

Rodney was saying bitterly, "I remember all of us being so smug about our foolproof plan to help these people without risking an invasion. Yes, that turned out just as well as our altruistic attempts always--"

"I do not recall the smugness," Teyla interrupted firmly. "We did the right thing. The consequences were beyond our control."

Rodney snorted.

But after that John dreamt that he was in the conference room with the turquoise and copper wall panels on Atlantis' control gallery. Elizabeth was sitting across from him, saying something to Teyla. Ford was just taking a seat, and Rodney was walking in.

Then the unscheduled activation alarm went off. John shoved away from the table and beat the others out to the gallery. "The shield is up," Peter Grodin said as John slid to a halt beside the dialing console.

"Yeah." John watched the gate, the faint glow of the active shield over the blue pool of the wormhole. It would flare if someone tried to come through, a brief burst of energy that marked the impact. "We don't have any teams offworld."

"Can we tell what the planet of origin is yet?" Elizabeth asked, frowning. "I don't remember any Athosians taking personal travel."

"No, Avrim and Lelia returned yesterday," Teyla said, with a worried glance at John.

Grodin shook his head, his eyes still on the readouts. "I'll have it in just a moment, the database search is-- Wait." He touched his headset, his expression turning incredulous. "I'm getting an IDC. An Atlantean IDC. It's not one of the codes we give to our trading partners."

"Okay," John drew the word out. "We just established that there's no one out there right now who should have one of those."

"This is--" Startled, Grodin checked a screen on his laptop, then said, "Major, it's your IDC. It's an old one, we've changed the codes twice since then, but it's definitely yours." He looked up helplessly.

"What the hell?" Rodney shouldered forward, dumping the nearest tech out of his chair so he could pull it up beside the console and sit down. Grodin passed him the laptop without a fight. "It could be the Genii. Didn't we change that code because we thought they had your radio?"

"No, that was the one before that," John told him. He was getting a really bad feeling about this.

"Right, but--" Rodney froze. He looked up, his face turning pale. "The address. It's M5X-273."

John knew that one. "The planet with the Quantum Mirror." He exchanged a look with Elizabeth. "That's not good."

Elizabeth's expression was deeply worried. "But you shut down the Mirror we found."

"We changed the setting and turned off the control pad," Rodney corrected sharply. "There's no way to shut down a Quantum Mirror, they draw power directly from subspace."

Grodin said suddenly, "I'm getting a transmission. It's in Morse Code." He lifted his brows. "They must want to prove that they're from Earth."

Rodney snapped his fingers impatiently. "Yes, yes, we get that, now run it through the system so we can find out what the hell it says."

"I don't need to translate it, I recognize it. It's SOS." Grodin frowned. "It's stopped."

The gate shut down abruptly, the wormhole winking out of existence. "They do that from their end?" John asked.

Rodney nodded grimly. "Yes. They must want us to dial back." He looked up, his mouth twisted. "I suppose we seem just that stupid."

Teyla shook her head, appalled. "But the mirror in the other Atlantis would have been destroyed with the city. They would not have had time to remove it, surely."

"That Mirror, yeah," John told her. "But there's a lot of Atlantises."

"Yes. We have no way of knowing if these are the people who attacked us before, or another group who actually needs our help." Elizabeth drew a hand through her hair, troubled.

Everybody else was quiet, waiting. "We can send a MALP through," John pointed out. "If it is a trap, we don't have to walk into it."

She nodded finally. "I don't see any other way around it. We have to dial M5X-273."

The dream shut off like a light, and John was awake, lying on the pallet in the dim gray light of the back room and staring at the cracked stone ceiling. He was tangled in the blankets, sweating and too hot in the damp air.

Rodney was leaning over him, brow furrowed. "What? What did you say?"

"The planet. M5X--" John wet his lips. It was all in fragments again. "I don't know if I can say it."

Rodney looked anxious. "Careful. Anything related to what happened, the things they don't want you to remember, might be a trigger for your-- The procedure that they did to you. And I know that that's the case, because I saw it happen." He rubbed his eyes and looked away. "I tested it."

"Oh, thanks," John said vaguely. He pushed himself into a sitting position, swaying back and forth when the room seemed to rock. He still felt fuzzy and distant. _Escape,_ he told himself. _Real soon now._

"Yes, sorry. But I didn't know if I could trust my informant." Rodney's expression turned sour. "I had to make certain."

"That's okay." John considered it. He didn't think it would hurt to ask questions. "So, the clone thing?"

Rodney stared at him like he had suddenly grown another head. "Clone thing? What thing?"

"Nothing." John couldn't remember why he was so convinced that the clone story was true, why they had even bothered to tell him that. _Because...I knew there was two of me, and I wouldn't let it go until they explained it and told me where the other one was._ "But there is two of me, right?"

"Yes." Rodney eyed him sharply. "Are you all right? Any reaction?"

"Uh...." _Appalled and terrified?_ He didn't think that was what Rodney meant. "I guess not."

Rodney nodded, relieved. "Good. This could work, then." He made an imperative gesture. "Keep going."

John closed his eyes tightly. This one he wasn't sure he wanted an answer to. "Elizabeth? Atlantis?"

"She's fine, the city's fine."

John swallowed, his throat suddenly dry. That wasn't what he had expected. He had thought Rodney would tell him what had happened, how the city had been destroyed. This was...too good to be true.

Rodney was telling him what he wanted to hear. And that was the problem. Who did you believe, the people who gave you bad news or the ones that said everything was fine? Especially when the ones who said everything was fine had tricked him and stunned him and dragged him off away from the expedition. And he really hated it when that happened. "What happened to you?"

Rodney looked anxious. "What do you mean?"

"You don't remember telling me Sumner was a hallucination, you don't remember being afraid to get near me. And there's the whole kidnapping thing. After I saw you talk to the traders...." John stopped. His head was starting to hurt again, and he could feel the barrier in his brain almost as if it was a physical thing, as if he could reach in and pull it out if he knew how. "There's two of you."

Rodney hesitated. "Yes. He-- The first me that you met left that night, so I could take his place. Teyla brought him a message that convinced him to help us. I probably shouldn't tell you what was in it, that might trigger the--" He pointed at his own head and waved his hand wildly, wincing.

John was still dealing with the first part. "He left through the gate. When the traders came that morning. The men at the gate are in on it with you."

"Yes, he slipped into the party of traders and left with them. Then he went-- Well, he's not here anymore." Rodney made that sound like a good thing.

John persisted, "That's what you're waiting for. For them to come through the gate again so you can leave without Sumner knowing."

"Well, in general, yes. There are other factors that--"

John didn't give a crap about the other factors. "And you're taking me with you."

"Hello, yes, that's the point," Rodney said impatiently.

"Why?"

Rodney threw his arms up in exasperation. "Why do you think?"

John shook his head, sorting through a mental list of possibilities. He took a wild guess. "Medical experiments?"

Rodney boggled. "No! What? No!"

One of the traders suggested worriedly, "Perhaps I should get Teyla."

"I'm not going to talk anymore," John said. He tried to get up, but his legs just folded and he ended up curled on the pallet again. After a moment, Rodney hesitantly rested a hand on the back of his neck. Despite everything, every reason John had to distrust him, it still felt like the touch of a friend, and John faded into sleep again.

  
***

  
The day wore on, and the worse John felt, the harder it got to think. He felt too disconnected from his body to tell how sick he was; he wasn't sure how many treatments he had missed. Too many, probably. He curled up in the blankets and stopped responding to Rodney and Teyla and the others, despite all the temptation of soft voices and gentle hands and Rodney yelling at him.

The light had shaded into the deep gray of late afternoon when John heard shouting, a scuffle. He opened his eyes to see Sumner standing over him.

John had a flash of memory that left him breathless -- _Sumner standing over him while three of his men held John down on a medical gurney, fighting, helpless, sick with terror at what they were about to do to him_. He had killed those three men. One of them had shoved him against a wall, and he had remembered enough to know he wanted them dead. They weren't expedition members.

Sumner said, "Get up."

His eyes never leaving Sumner, John uncoiled out of the blankets, coming smoothly to his feet. His heart was pounding, pumping way too much adrenalin, and it quivered through his body, running like ice prickles down his back. The men with Sumner shifted uneasily back a step.

Sumner said evenly, "I should kill you where you stand."

One of the men said, "They told us if we can't come back with him alive, don't come back at all."

"Shut up," Sumner snapped. He looked at John, bared his teeth in something that wasn't a smile. "You want to go back to the others, don't you."

That wasn't specific enough. John watched him, not blinking.

"The expedition, what's left of Atlantis," Sumner clarified.

He was talking about it like he wasn't part of it, like he hadn't been the CO. John said, "You weren't with us."

Sumner's eyes narrowed. "What?"

Maybe it didn't matter if this was Sumner or not. John had been told not to harm anyone who was a member of the expedition. Sumner's men weren't. Maybe he wasn't either. "When we left Earth. You weren't with us."

"Of course not." Sumner grimaced. He told the men, "Bring him."

Nobody moved. John said, "That was a trick question."

Sumner swore, stepped forward and grabbed John's arm, dragging him toward the doorway. John let him.

There were two men out there, covering Rodney and Teyla, and a few of the other traders. The traders looked unarmed, but John wouldn't have bet on that.

Sumner stopped a few paces from Rodney and Teyla, keeping his grip on John's arm. He said, "Where's the real McKay?"

Rodney lifted his chin. "Well that was phrased badly, wasn't it?"

"Where is he?" Sumner grated. "Is he dead?"

Rodney threw a look at Teyla. "Look, we haven't attacked you people. We were trying to help you, and it went hideously wrong, and now we just want to leave with the Major. We can give you weapons, supplies, just don't--"

"We don't need anything from you except what we already have," Sumner said tightly. "Just answer me or we can all start shooting."

Rodney flicked a look at Teyla. She nodded minutely. He said, "All right, fine. He's in our dimension. He went through the Mirror two days ago. He's unharmed, he went voluntarily."

Sumner laughed. "I don't care if he's harmed or not. I just wanted to make sure he wasn't here somewhere plotting against me. Hell, you can keep him." He drew his pistol.

John slammed an elbow into Sumner's face, felt bone crack. He grabbed for the pistol, aware Teyla was already moving, that the other traders were moving. Sumner tried to wrench away but John was inside his guard, had all the leverage he needed to twist the gun away. Sumner got him around the neck and John just pointed the gun down and pumped a couple of shots into Sumner's gut.

As Sumner fell away, John saw Rodney had dropped into a crouch, trying to scramble toward the wall and the partial shelter of the pillars. John leapt toward him, pushed him down, and shot the two Marines coming toward him. Rodney gasped, "What, you, how--" John shoved him toward the pillars and kept moving.

John was beginning to think Sumner's men weren't actually Marines, because their discipline sucked. The traders shot three more of them and the others tried to run. Another group arrived, men that John thought might be the gate guards that the traders had suborned. There was a lot of fighting after that, and John was already too confused to participate. There was just no way he could figure out who it was okay to kill, so he withdrew into the ruin. He watched them from a rooftop, concealed by a broken pillar, and it wasn't long before a large group of reinforcements arrived and Sumner's men retreated in confusion. Then the traders and the new arrivals started to search the ruins looking for John, so he had to keep moving around. Rodney kept bellowing "Major!" at the top of his lungs, but John didn't feel like being kidnapped again.

Then he heard the quiet purr of drive pods and came out in time to see a jumper de-cloaking in midair. It was drifting downward for a landing on the pavement outside the round building. He had to get closer, to see if it was real, and so was completely unprepared when Ford tackled him. Flattened to the ground, John just said sharply, "Get the hell off me, Lieutenant!"

Startled, Ford said, "Yes, sir!" and scrambled off him, and John shoved to his feet and bolted into the ruins again.

But they had life signs detectors, so they surrounded him pretty quickly. John was reaching the limit of his failing endurance anyway, so he let Teyla coax him out and take his pistol away.

Almost to the jumper, John saw himself and another Rodney, standing with the gate guards. That scared the crap out of him. He remembered being told he was a substitute, and if he wasn't needed anymore he didn't know what they were going to do to him. Better not to find out.

But he didn't have much strength left to resist, and ended up entering the jumper slung over Benson's shoulder.

Pinned face down on the floor, with people talking over his head, he knew they were going to the gate and he tried to think at the jumper, telling it not to dial. It ignored him, though it did flick the lights off and on a lot.

Markham was piloting, and had to carefully maneuver the jumper down past the pillars protecting the gate well to enter the wormhole. Once the jumper was through, John heard murmurs of relief. "Where the hell are we now?" he managed.

He heard Teyla ask, "Should we let him see where we are going? I am not certain it will help or hurt."

Rodney said, "Let him up. If it helps him remember, he'll be easier to deal with. If it triggers the reaction, it'll knock him unconscious and he'll still be easier to deal with. Oh, don't look at me like that!" he added when John sat up. "Please, you know I'm right!"

Through the door to the cockpit John could see the jumper's port. They were on a planet he didn't recognize, a desert with red sand and a bright blue sky. The jumper was flying low over the ground, heading rapidly toward a scatter of sandstone buildings. The big square center structure had one wall blasted out, with blocks flung everywhere, and the jumper slowed, carefully angling to head for the opening. "We had to blow it open with C-4," Ford said, watching John anxiously. "On our side, we just moved the Mirror out to the field."

He seemed to want a response so John just nodded. When he looked back, the jumper had slid through the opening into the ruined building. Across from it, propped against the scarred sandstone wall, was a giant mirror in a naquadah frame. Except it wasn't reflecting the jumper; it was reflecting an open field of tall yellow grass, bordered by thick green forest. Rodney was telling Markham, "Just slow, slow, remember you just have to get close enough for the jumper's drive field to intersect with the Mirror's event horizon."

_Oh, right. Quantum Mirror,_ John thought. Then he passed out.

  
***

  
He woke in the jumper bay on a stretcher, with people running around and yelling orders. Elizabeth was leaning over him, studying him anxiously, and he said, "Hey, you're not dead either."

"No, I'm not." She squeezed his hand in both of hers, smiling in relief.

This was Atlantis, intact and beautiful, with a lot of familiar faces. There was the infirmary, and an oxygen mask, and a very Scottish Beckett saying, "If he's conscious, talk to him. Tell him everything's all right, tell him you missed him, tell him what you had for lunch, just talk. Don't be worried if he can't respond coherently, just keep him calm until these bloody awful drugs have time to break down in his system."

There was also a lot of sleeping. John had a dream about sending a MALP through to M5X-273, the planet with the Quantum Mirror. Watching the video feed, seeing the familiar gray uniforms, the disorienting sensation of catching a glimpse of Rodney on the fuzzy video, when Rodney was sitting at a console two feet away. The even stranger feeling when one of the figures crouched down to look into the MALP's camera, and he saw his own face.

It was an identical face, not prematurely aged. This group wasn't from the Goa'uld-controlled Atlantis that had attacked them through the Mirror before. But they weren't far from it.

Their Earth had fallen too, and Pegasus had been colonized by the Goa'uld and their humans-turned-Jaffa slaves. But this expedition had rebelled against their Goa'uld, killed her, sabotaged Atlantis with a naquadah bomb to cut themselves off from Earth, and fled to another world. They had been searching the Mirror universes for a human-controlled Atlantis, thinking it would be in contact with an Earth that had defeated the Goa'uld. They asked for help.

John didn't think they could give them anything. It wasn't like they had weapons or supplies to spare. They couldn't even offer them data; these people didn't have the Ancient gene, they hadn't been able to use the jumpers or the life signs detectors; most of the technology of their lost Atlantis had been useless to them. But there was something, something Beckett said was in the medical database.

The medlab had copied the information onto a couple of different formats, included a thick sheaf of printout just in case, wrapped it all in a waterproof packet, and Elizabeth had tossed it through the wormhole.

John took a cloaked jumper through later, to make certain the other universe group had left as requested, to change the setting on the Mirror and switch it off again, so at least that group couldn't return. The packet was gone, but there were life signs in the jungle near the Mirror's temple. "Something's funny," Ford said, studying the HUD. "They're moving around a lot. Like they're fighting. Or something's chasing them."

"We're not reading any darts. Teyla?"

"I am not sensing any Wraith, Major."

"Right. We're going to have to check this out."

They couldn't take the jumper into the jungle, so John set it down and left it cloaked in the field. Running through a forest thick with shadows, a scatter of gunfire, following the life signs detector to a bloody body in gray and black, half-buried in the undergrowth. He had swung around to see men behind him, but between the shadows under the trees, the uniforms, and the build of the guy in front, for a second he had thought he was looking at Stackhouse and the other Marines he had brought for backup. In the next heartbeat he had seen the guy's unfamiliar face; then it was too late.

He was stunned but not completely unconscious. He was coming to, dimly, when he saw Sumner standing over him. _This is freaky,_ he thought. Sumner smiled in cold triumph and said, "I finally got you."

John thought, _this isn't the right Sumner._ He managed to rasp out, "You got the wrong one."

Sumner's face went still. Then he crouched down and jerked John's shirt up, revealing his unscarred abdomen.

He knew he was slung over somebody's shoulder, he knew they were taking him through the Mirror, propped against a wall in some isolated desert ruin, then through a gate to a gray stone city, and he knew there was no way in hell his people were going to find him.

They had locked him up for a while in a little stone room, though he had heard enough to know that the others were pissed with Sumner. They were mad that he hadn't brought back the tretonin formula, they suspected Sumner was lying when he said the tretonin was a trick, that John's people had attacked their team. They were really pissed that John's duplicate was dead. John started to hope that he could talk them into trading him back for the formula.

He hoped that, until they came to get him.

"So what now?" John asked, standing there with his hands cuffed in front of him, surrounded by Sumner's men. The lab looked biological or medical, that was all he could tell. He figured it was going to be an interrogation with extraneous torture, just because this Sumner seemed like that kind of guy. And the thought that everybody around him had a snake in a pouch in their belly made his skin crawl. "It's a little crowded in here for a firing squad."

Sumner said, "They don't want to kill you." He stepped close, grabbing a handful of John's hair and yanking him forward, nearly dragging him off his feet. "They're going to make you one of us."

John stared at him for a heartbeat, not getting it. The realization hit like a shot to the head. He punched Sumner in the face with his bound hands and went crazy, trying to make them kill him.

Instead they wrestled him onto a gurney, strapping him down. Beckett was telling Sumner, "You shouldn't have told him. It'll make the conditioning process that much more difficult."

The nurses woke him up then, because his heart monitor and the Ancient brainwave reading thing was going crazy. John came to confused and blank again, not sure where he was even though this looked like Atlantis. He curled up in the bed, sweating and shaking under the blankets, with Teyla and Rodney and Elizabeth taking turns telling him it was going to be all right.

  
***

  
The next time he woke up, he was groggy and Beckett was sitting on a stool beside the bed, saying, "Major, I'm going to say some words. You need to tell me if hearing them causes you any pain."

John sank down in the pillows, watching him warily. "Okay."

"Tretonin."

John squinted at the copper ceiling, trying to get his brain to work. "That's um, a drug. The SGC found it or developed it or something, and they gave it to Jaffa to wean them off the...." He remembered. "Oh, shit."

He sat bolt upright, flailing the IV tubes out of the way, throwing back the blanket and dragging up the scrub shirt to look at his stomach.

"John, John, it's all right!" Beckett said hurriedly, dropping his clipboard to untangle the IV. "The procedure didn't get that far, thankfully. We checked."

"Did you check everywhere?" John demanded.

"Yes, lad, I checked everywhere," Beckett told him firmly. "Apparently, without a Goa'uld Queen's help, turning a human into a Jaffa is a more lengthy process. They had to suppress your immune system, weaken your body's resistance with a diet of only the most basic nutrients, before they could do the surgery to construct the pouch and implant the larval Goa'uld."

"Oh. Good," John said. Then Beckett handed him a basin and he threw up.

  
***

  
Elizabeth came later, sitting beside the bed and smiling. "How's your memory today?"

"A lot better." Things had been coming back in big splotches. John shifted around in the bed, trying to get comfortable. "I remember they asked us for help."

"Yes. We decided to give them the formula for tretonin, the experimental drug for restoring the Jaffas' immune system. We decided it was the least we could do, with no risk to ourselves."

John nodded. That part was fairly clear. "Yeah. Even if they were lying, there was no way they could hurt us with it."

"Yes, it seemed like a good idea at the time." She pressed her lips together. "What we didn't know is that the alternate expedition had been contacted by another group of rebel Earth Jaffa, led by Colonel Sumner. They had joined forces, but there was a power struggle ongoing between your duplicate and Sumner."

John frowned, concentrating. "Sumner was there, on M5X-273. He jumped the other me when they were on their way back to the temple with the packet. But I-- He got away, wounded. Sumner found me instead."

Elizabeth nodded, letting her breath out. "Ford and the others found your duplicate, badly injured and unconscious. They realized almost immediately it wasn't you, but the man needed medical attention immediately. Ford sent him back to Atlantis with Rodney and Teyla, and took the Marines through the Mirror after you. He managed to secure the structure the Mirror was in, but he ended up in a stand-off with the men your duplicate had left to guard it. He opened negotiations, offering to trade him for you. And that's when his counterpart on the other side, a man named Mitch -- is that familiar?"

John shook his head. "Uh, yeah. Somebody I knew in--" Somebody who hadn't died in Afghanistan on Goa'uld Earth, apparently. "Go on."

"Mitch realized Sumner was up to something. Sumner had apparently told him that we had attacked your duplicate's team."

John pressed his hands to his eyes, putting the pieces together. He remembered the meetings, remembered them working on the plan. Sumner's plan, that the others hadn't wanted to agree to. "Sumner wanted to raid Atlantis. Our Atlantis. Capture scientists who didn't have a duplicate and take them back, take our supplies, our data, maybe figure out a way to give themselves the Ancient gene. He didn't know what we had here, but he wanted it." He looked up, wincing. "But I wasn't-- The other me wasn't dead."

"Mitch concealed the fact that your duplicate was alive from Sumner and the expedition senior staff, since he didn't know who to trust. He made a deal with Ford, to help us retrieve you in exchange for the return of your duplicate and help in eliminating Sumner. He was in charge of the detail that guarded the gate, and the men were loyal to your duplicate, so he was able to slip Teyla and a group of the Athosians in, posing as native traders." She lifted her brows ruefully. "It took a while to put all this together. We had plenty of volunteers, but they had to be people who wouldn't be affected by entropic cascade failure, since they would have to stay in the other dimension for at least a few days. The only way to tell that was by trial and error, having them go through the Mirror and wait a day or so to see if they had a negative reaction. Eventually Teyla was able to put together a large enough group to make the attempt. By that time your duplicate was conscious and talking, and gave us reason to think Rodney's duplicate might help. Teyla managed to contact him, and to give him a message from your duplicate, and he agreed to let our Rodney take his place."

John grimaced. "I nearly caught you making the switch."

"It's probably a very good thing you didn't. We know they gave you a form of temporary amnesia, and tried to condition you to obey orders. Apparently the process didn't work quite the way they expected." Her lips pursed and he caught a flicker of warm amusement in her eyes.

John had to smile ruefully. "That was a lost cause."

She smiled back. "I wasn't going to say it."

  
***

  
Since John was no longer in danger from dropping dead from the common cold, Beckett let him out of bed. This basically meant John got to go to the bathroom by himself. He was still confined to the infirmary and its immediate vicinity, but John didn't care. It was Atlantis, he was home, and he wasn't crazy. Or a clone. Or a Jaffa. He was sitting in Beckett's office, reading, when Rodney walked in.

"I forgive you for kidnapping me," John told him.

"Yes, very relieved," Rodney said briskly. "In lieu of flowers or a potted plant, I brought you your laptop."

"Thanks." John tucked it under his arm. He didn't have that much work to catch up on. Teyla had showed him a calendar yesterday, and the whole experience had only taken sixteen days. Writing the report was going to be fun. "And thanks for the other thing."

Rodney frowned. "Which other thing?" John lifted a brow. Rodney huffed. "Oh, that. You would have done it for me. In fact, you did exactly that on our last foray into Quantum Hell. The terror and constant fear of discovery, and did I mention the terror, aside, it was the best way to get you out of there without a full-scale assault." He grimaced. "We were just lucky my duplicate agreed to cooperate. And that he had been completely refusing to participate in Sumner's insane plan, so I had a reason to avoid everyone else as much as possible." He tapped his fingers on the desk, looking thoughtful. "I wonder if it's worth a statistical study on the probability of encountering an Atlantis where the inhabitants are actually better off than we are."

John knew the answer to that one. "Probably not."

 

**end**


End file.
